25 Extraordinary Math Principles To Challenge Your Brain

Math is crazy. While the basics are pretty simple, the philosophy behind some of those very simple fundamentals can be quite profound…and even bewildering. Today we’re going to look at everything from prime numbers to infinity. So get ready because these are 25 Extraordinary Math Principles To Challenge Your Brain!

25

The equator rope

Source: abc.net.au, Image: pexels (public domain)

If you wrapped a rope around the equator of the Earth so that it was tightly hugging the ground, you would only need to add about 6.3 meters of rope in order for the entire thing to hover 1 meter above ground level (all the way around the Earth). This counterintuitive result works no matter how big the sphere is. The most simple way to explain this is to remember that circumference is equal to diameter times pi. This means that if you want to make the rope hover 1 meter above the Earth, you only need to increase the diameter by 2 meters (1 meter on each end of the globe). Therefore, you would only need to increase the circumference of the rope by 2 x pi meters (6.28318530718 meters).

24

Hippasus of Metapontum

The man who proved that irrational numbers existed was murdered for it. His name was Hippasus of Metapontum, and it happened around 520 BC. Pythagoras and many Greek mathematicians of the time believed that all numbers were integers, or whole. It was when Pythagoras was performing his famous triangle calculations (Pythagorean theorem) that he stumbled across the square root of two. To make a long story short, he allegedly tried to keep his finding a secret and flipped out when Hippasus published it.

23

Munchausen numbers

Source: zach.se

Apart from making some assumptions about 0^0, 3435 is the only number besides 1 where you can split each digit up, raise it to its own power, sum it all together, and get the same number back. Basically, 3^3 + 4^4 + 3^3 + 5^5 = 3435 Note: 438579088 also works if you assume that 0^0 = 0. These are called Munchausen numbers.

22

The decimal representation of the 7th's

Image: https://pixabay.com (public domain)

The decimal representations of the 7th’s are the same set of numbers being repeated except always starting from a different point. 1/7 = 0.142857142857… and 2/7 = 0.285714285714… and 3/7 = 0.428571428571…